The United States likely surpassed Russia and Saudi Arabia to become the world’s largest crude oil producer earlier this year, based on preliminary estimates in EIA’s Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO).
I am so old I can remember when the best minds and the best media said the U.S. could not drill its way to energy independence.
“…In February, U.S. crude oil production exceeded that of Saudi Arabia for the first time in more than two decades. In June and August, the United States surpassed Russia in crude oil production for the first time since February 1999.
Although EIA does not publish crude oil production forecasts for Russia and Saudi Arabia in STEO, EIA expects that U.S. crude oil production will continue to exceed Russian and Saudi Arabian crude oil production for the remaining months of 2018 and through 2019.
U.S. crude oil production, particularly from light sweet crude oil grades, has rapidly increased since 2011. Much of the recent growth has occurred in areas such as the Permian region in eastern Texas and western New Mexico, the Federal Offshore Gulf of Mexico, and the Bakken region in North Dakota and Montana.
Following the oil price decline in mid-2014, U.S. producers reduced their costs by temporarily scaling back crude oil production. However, after crude oil prices increased in early 2016, investment and production began increasing later that year. By comparison, Russia and Saudi Arabia have maintained relatively steady crude oil production growth in recent years…”
Journalism
Without evidence? How about the texts back and forth between FBI officials documenting their plans? Apparently CNN believes information from unverified anonymous sources is evidence, but digital capture of actual texts between individuals is not. Journalism!
Don’t Be Fooled, There Was Nothing ‘Financial’ About the 2008 Crisis
I generally supported President Bush’s bailout of the big financial companies in 2008. Now, I think time has shown that policy was a mistake.
“…Lehman’s bankruptcy didn’t cause a “crisis” as much as the Bush administration’s foolish decision to bail out Bear Stearns months before created the perception in the marketplace that Lehman would be saved too. As such, investors weren’t prepared for the correct decision to let Lehman go. Put simply, Lehman was only earth-shaking insofar as prior government intervention turned what was healthy into a surprise. And having erred mightily in bailing out Bear, the Bush administration chose to make a bad situation much worse.
Indeed, in conjunction with the SEC it banned short-selling on 900 different financial stocks. Talk about pouring gasoline onto the fire. Seemingly missed by Administration officials is that short sellers are ultimately buyers. When short sellers are able to express their pessimism in the marketplace, a huge reserve of buying power is created when we remember that shorts can only take profits insofar as they buy back the shares sold short. Yet when the markets needed them most as both price givers and liquidity providers, the Bushies banned them.
After that, bailouts are not free. Governments don’t mis-allocate the money of others only to walk away. They offer up the money of others only to demand a more muscular role in how the saved operate. Ok, but the 20th century was a monument to the failure of central planning. Is it any wonder that future-seeing investors looked negatively on a return of excessive government intervention in commerce?
What can’t be stressed enough about what happened in 2008 is that for economies to grow and markets to rise, it’s necessary that the mediocre and lousy constantly be replaced by the good and brilliant…”
Republican Attacked in California, Media Does Not Report
Glenn Reynolds:
WEIRD HOW THIS ISN’T GETTING MUCH PRESS EXCEPT ON DRUDGE:
If the parties were reversed there’d be calls for censorship of “hate sites,” and every GOP candidate would be asked about it by the press. But the Dems, and MSNBC, will escape all accountability I predict. Because our press is partisan and dishonest and corrupt and perfectly okay with violence so long as it’s against the right people.
How Anti-Trump Leakers Moved From Offense to Defense
“…A trail of evidence appearing in major news outlets suggests a campaign to undermine President Trump from within the government through illegal leaks of classified information, and then to thwart congressional investigators probing the disclosures. . . . Past and present U.S. officials say the template for the leak campaign can be traced back to the Obama administration’s efforts to sell the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which made the press reliant on background conversations and favorable leaks from government officials…”
Pope Francis: ‘The Great Accuser Has Been Unchained and Is Attacking Bishops’
The Pope has completely failed to address the real and criminal issues that affect the clergy. Does the Pope believe that blaming the accusations on the work of the devil will resolve the homosexual child abuse scandal and his failure to act on that scandal?
The Pope should resign.
“…During his homily at Mass on Tuesday morning, Pope Francis blamed the devil for the sexual abuse scandal that has shaken the Catholic church to its core. But not in the way you think. To the pope’s way of thinking it is the efforts to expose the sinful cover-ups of abusive clergymen that are the work of Satan.
Using the term “Great Accuser” during his homily at Casa Santa Marta on Tuesday morning, Pope Francis seemed to demonize those who question the actions of the leaders of the church, telling the assembled bishops that they seem to be under satanic attack in order to “scandalize the people.”…”
Small business optimism surges to highest level ever, topping previous record under Reagan
GOVERNMENT FOR RENT
Iain Murray:
“…My organization (the Competitive Enterprise Institute) released a new report this morning by our brilliant Senior Fellow Chris Horner, detailing a scheme in which governors’ offices are coordinating with environmental activists and donors, who in turn are underwriting a massive, off-the-books campaign to provide staff and other resources to elected officials. The report, titled “Government for Rent: How Special Interests Finance Governors to Pursue Their Climate Policy Agenda,” uses public documents to demonstrate how donors are funneling tens of millions of dollars to privately fund staff—public relations professionals, consultants, and what aides call “necessary support functions”—for climate advocacy work at the governors’ disposal. This report follows Horner’s recent analysis detailing how activist donors are paying to place prosecutors in state attorney general offices to pursue an expressly partisan climate change agenda…”
9/11 Not Forgotten
Lee Harris:
“…Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe.
…
They forget that in time of danger, in the face of the Enemy, they must trust and confide in each other, or perish.
They forget, in short, that there has ever been a category of human experience called the Enemy. And that, before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of the Enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary. An enemy was just a friend we hadn’t done enough for — yet. Or perhaps there had been a misunderstanding, or an oversight on our part — something that we could correct. And this means that that our first task is that we must try to grasp what the concept of the Enemy really means.
The Enemy is someone who is willing to die in order to kill you. And while it is true that the Enemy always hates us for a reason — it is his reason, and not ours…”
‘Silent Donation’: Corporate Emails Reveal Google Executives’ Efforts to Turn Out Latino Voters Who They Thought Would Vote for Clinton
“…An email chain among senior Google executives from the day after the 2016 presidential election reveals the company tried to influence the 2016 United States presidential election on behalf of one candidate, Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton. . . . The four page email begins with Murillo claiming she and others at Google were engaged in non-partisan activities not designed to help any one candidate or another—only to undercut her own commentary in later passages in the emails by openly admitting the entire effort to boost Latino turnout using Google products with official company resources was to elect Clinton over Trump. The critical miscalculation, Murillo wrote in a stunning admission in the email, was that Latino voters backed Trump by higher margins than any experts had forecast in the lead-up to the election. Trump’s 29 percent among Hispanics nationally blew prognosticators away, and he hit even higher numbers—about 31 percent—in the key battleground state of Florida, Murillo admitted…”
More on Shoddy Journalism
Michael Crichton:
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
Troll Level Galactic Mega-God
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 10, 2018
Cost Disease
Scott Alexander:
College is worse
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/
On Free Speech
Justice Louis Brandeis:
Those who won our independence . . . believed liberty to be the secret of happiness, and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that, without free speech and assembly, discussion would be futile; that, with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty, and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government.
Modern Democrats Adopt Policies of Antebellum Democrats, Media Doesn’t Notice
Ed Driscoll strung this together
PARTYING LIKE IT’S 1859:
● Atlanta Mayor Signs Order Banning ICE Detainees
● ‘Not Here, Not Now’: Gov. Brown Signs Bill Blocking Trump’s Offshore Drilling Plan.
● Cities defiant after Justice Department’s threat on ‘supervised injection sites.’
Old and busted: Confederate-era Democrats believe they can pick and choose which federal laws they wish to enforce.
The new hotness? Err, pretty much the same in the Trump era.
Effects of Government Involvement in Economic Sectors
From Mark Perry:
It’s shameful what US Open did to Naomi Osaka
Reminds me of Hillary’s defeat and similar behavior from the “in-crowd”
“…Naomi Osaka, 20 years old, just became the first player from Japan to win a Grand Slam.
Yet rather than cheer Osaka, the crowd, the commentators and US Open officials all expressed shock and grief that Serena Williams lost.
Osaka spent what should have been her victory lap in tears. It had been her childhood dream to make it to the US Open and possibly play against Williams, her idol, in the final.
It’s hard to recall a more unsportsmanlike event.
Here was a young girl who pulled off one of the greatest upsets ever, who fought for every point she earned, ashamed.
At the awards ceremony, Osaka covered her face with her black visor and cried. The crowd booed her. Katrina Adams, chairman and president of the USTA, opened the awards ceremony by denigrating the winner and lionizing Williams — whose ego, if anything, needs piercing.
“Perhaps it’s not the finish we were looking for today,” Adams said, “but Serena, you are a champion of all champions.” Addressing the crowd, Adams added, “This mama is a role model and respected by all.”
That’s not likely the case now, not after the world watched as Serena Williams had a series of epic meltdowns on the court, all sparked when the umpire warned her: No coaching from the side. Her coach was making visible hand signals.
“I don’t cheat to win,” Williams told him. “I’d rather lose.”
She couldn’t let it go, going back multiple times to berate the umpire. At one point she called him a thief.
“You stole a point from me!” she yelled.
After her loss, Williams’s coach admitted to ESPN that he had, in fact, been coaching from the stands, a code violation. The warning was fair.
Everything that followed is on Williams, who is no stranger to tantrums. Most famously, she was tossed from the US Open in 2009 after telling the line judge, “I swear to God I’ll take the f—king ball and shove it down your f—king throat.” John McEnroe was taken aback. Even Williams’s mother Oracene Price couldn’t defend her daughter’s outburst…
Lembert Dome
Quote of the Day
Harry Callahan: Well, when an adult male is chasing a female with intent to commit rape, I shoot the bastard. That’s my policy.
Dirty Harry
The Mayor: Intent? How did you establish that?
Harry Callahan: When a man is chasing a woman through an alley with a butcher’s knife and a hard-on, I figure he isn’t out collecting for the Red Cross.